Samuel R. Delany, whose theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy has won him a broad audience among academics and fans of postmodernist fiction, offers insights into and explorations ...of his own experience as writer, critic, theorist, and gay black man in his new collection of written interviews, a form he describes as a type of guided essay. Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of his thought and interests.
Longer Views Delany, Samuel R
2016, 2011-03-01
eBook
Six essays from the critic and award-winning author exploring topics such as theater, LGBTQ+ scholarship, cyborgs, metaphors, and Star Wars. "Reading is a many-layered process—like writing, " ...observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls "the hard-edged boundaries of meaning" by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he's writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus, Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy. "Over the course of his career, " Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, "Delany has again and again thrown into question the world- models that all too many of us unknowingly live by." Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views. "An intellectually adventurous book... Every page of every essay here rewards a second reading, and a third. Delany has a fearsomely stocked intellect, and a wider range of experience than most writers can even imagine... He is brilliant, driven, prolific." — The Nation "One of science fiction's grand masters... Delany's elegant command of language and deep insight into other authors' works are delightful to behold." — Booklist "Rare personal frankness and stunning erudition... Recommended for readers who enjoy the challenge of being led into remote regions of a gifted mind." — Library Journal
Twentieth anniversary edition of a landmark book that cataloged a vibrant but disappearing neighborhood in New York City
In the two decades that preceded the original publication of Times Square Red, ...Times Square Blue , Forty-second Street, then the most infamous street in America, was being remade into a sanitized tourist haven. In the forced disappearance of porn theaters, peep shows, and street hustlers to make room for a Disney store, a children’s theater, and large, neon-lit cafes, Samuel R. Delany saw a disappearance, not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there.
Samuel R. Delany bore witness to the dismantling of the institutions that promoted points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space, and in this hybrid text, argues for the necessity of public restrooms and tree-filled parks to a city's physical and psychological landscape.
This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Robert Reid-Pharr that traces the importance and continued resonances of Samuel R. Delany’s groundbreaking Times Square Red, Times Square Blue .
From the four-time Nebula Award-winning novelist and literary critic, essential reading for the creative writer. Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to ...place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an indispensable companion for serious writers everywhere."Delany has certainly spent more time thinking about the process of generating narratives-and subsequently getting the fruits of his lucubrations down on paper?than any other writer in the genre. . . . Delany's latest volume in this vein (About Writing) might be his best yet... Truly, as the jacket copy boasts, this book is the next best thing to taking one of Delany's courses. . . . Readers will find many answers here to the mysteries of getting words down on a page." -Paul DiFilippo, Asimov's Science Fiction"Useful and thoughtful advice for aspiring (and practicing apprentice) authors. About Writing is autobiography, criticism, and a guidebook to good writing all in one." -Robert Elliot Fox, Professor of English, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale"Should go on the short list of required reading for every would-be writer." -New York Times Book Review (on Of Doubts and Dreams in About Writing)
From the Hugo and Nebula–winning author, three literary tales trace the intricate interdependencies of memory, experience, and the self. Wesleyan University Press has made a significant commitment to ...the publication of the work of Samuel R. Delany, including this recent fiction, now available in paperback. The three long stories collected in Atlantis: three tales—"Atlantis: Model 1924, " "Erik, Gwen, and D. H. Lawrences Aesthetic of Unrectified Feeling, " and "Citre et Trans" —explore problems of memory, history, and transgression. Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and Guest of Honor at the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Delany was won a broad audience among fans of postmodern fiction with his theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy. The stories of Atlantis: Three Tales are not science fiction, yet Locus, the trade publication of the science fiction field, notes that the title story "has an odd, unsettling power not usually associated with mainstream fiction." A writer whose audience extends across and beyond science fiction, black, gay, postmodern, and academic constituencies, Delany is finally beginning to achieve the broader recognition he deserves. "Delany, who's best known for his science fiction... takes a variety of literary turns in these three novellas that chronicle the experience of the African American writer in the 20th century... Balanced and full of intricate layers of prose, these novellas present a potpourri of literary references, detailed flashbacks and experimental page layouts. Delany seamlessly meshes graceful prose, cultural and philosophical depth and a knowledge of different forms and voices into a truly heady, literate blend." — Publishers Weekly "Delany sketches sympathetic portraits of young black men aswim in the dense, sweet hives of American cities." — New York Times Book Review
A dragon herder embarks on a quest to bring his beloved back from the dead in this Nebula Award–winning science fiction adventure. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, ...Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are "different" try to seize history and the day. Featuring a foreword by Neil Gaiman. "When Delany describes to us what he has seen, what he can compute, adduce, intuit or smell in the underbrush, our reaction is to sit bolt upright and cry out, "Of course, I have that very wound myself!" The ability to produce this reaction in people is one of the commonly accepted and apparently valid appurtenances of genius... I look forward to the explosion reading this will create within you." —A. J. Budrys, Galaxy Magazine
Samuel R. Delany, whose theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy has won him a broad audience among academics and fans of postmodernist fiction, offers insights into and explorations ...of his own experience as writer, critic, theorist, and gay black man in his new collection of written interviews, a form he describes as a type of "guided essay." Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of his thought and interests.
Joanna Russ and D. W. Griffith Delany, Samuel R.
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2004, Letnik:
119, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay begins by asserting the importance of Joanna Russ as an American writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Her feminist concerns and her stylistic bravura are examined, as are ...the ways in which she deals with the socioeconomic construction of power in orde r to transcend any uncritical biological essentialism. The second half of the essay considers the context of two phrases that occur in D. W. Griffith's film Intolerance and also in Russ's writing: "hill girl" and "the female man" (The Female Man is the title of one of Russ's novels). The possibility that Griffith's film is Russ's textual source for these phrases is considered.
